Feeling the dry heat on his face, looking at the colorful creatures surrounding him, Jetsam saw tweakers and hooks, panhandlers and ordinary Hollywood crazies, all mingling with tourists. He saw Mickey Mouse and Barney the dinosaur and Darth Vader (only one tonight) and a couple of King Kongs.
But the guys inside the gorilla costumes weren't tall enough to successfully play the great ape, and he saw a guy he recognized as Untouchable Al walk up to one of them and say, "King Kong, my ass. You look more like Cheetah."
Jetsam turned away quickly because if there was a disturbance, he wanted no part of Untouchable Al, especially not here on Hollywood Boulevard where the multitudes would witness the dreadful inevitable outcome.
A team of bike cops, one man and one woman whom Jetsam knew from Watch 3, pedaled by slowly on the sidewalk, over those very famous three-hundred-pound slabs of marble and brass dedicated to Hollywood magic and the glamour of the past.
The bike cops nodded to him but continued on their way when he shook his head, indicating that nothing important had brought him here. He thought they looked very uncool in their bike helmets and those funny blue outfits that the other cops called pajamas.
When B. M. Driscoll caught up with him, he said, "Don't this look a little bit strange? I mean, a purse is left here by an unknown person-reporting?"
Jetsam said, "Whaddaya mean?"
B. M. Driscoll said, "They're out to get me."
"Who?"
"Internal Affairs Group. In fact, the whole goddamn Professional Standards Bureau. I got grilled like an Al-Qaeda terrorist by a Force Investigation Team when I popped the cap at the goddamn crackhead that tried to run over me. I tell you, IA's out to get me."
"Man, you gotta go visit the Department shrink," Jetsam said. "You're soaring way out there, bro. You're sounding unhinged."
But B. M. Driscoll said, "I'll tell you something, if that purse is still there in the midst of this goddamn boulevard carnival, it means one thing. An undercover team has chased away every tweaker that's tried to pick it up during the last ten minutes."
And now Jetsam started getting paranoid. He began looking hard at every tourist nearby. Could that one be a cop? That one over there looks like he could be. And that babe pretending to be reading the name on one of the marble stars down on the sidewalk. Shit, her purse is bulging like maybe there's a Glock nine and handcuffs in there.
When they were standing at the phone booth and saw a woman's brown leather handbag on the phone booth tray, B. M. Driscoll said, "The purse is still there. Nobody's picked it up. No tweaker. No do-gooder. It's still there. If there's money in it, you can bet your ass this is a sting."
"If there's money in it, I gotta admit you might have a point here," Jetsam said, looking behind him for the babe with the bulge in her handbag. And goddamnit, she was looking right at him! Then she gave him a little flirtatious wave and walked away. Shit, just a badge bunny.
B. M. Driscoll picked up the purse and opened it as though he was expecting a trick snake to jump out, removed the thick leather wallet, and handed it to Jetsam, saying, "Tell me I'm wrong."
Jetsam opened it and found a driver's license, credit cards, and other ID belonging to a Mary R. Rollins of Seattle, Washington. Along with $367 dollars in currency.
"Bro, I think you ain't paranoid," Jetsam said. "Forget what I said about the shrink."
"Let's take this straight to the station and make a ten-ten," B. M. Driscoll said, referring to a property report.
"Let's take this to the Oracle," Jetsam said. "Let's call information for a phone number on Mary Rollins. Let's check and see if this ID is legit. I don't like to be set up like I'm a fucking thief."
"It's not you," B. M. Driscoll said, and now he was twitching and blinking. "It's me. I'm a marked man!"
When they got to the station, they found the Oracle in the john, reading a paper. Jetsam stood outside the toilet stall and said, "You in there, Boss?"
Recognizing the voice, the Oracle replied, "This better be more important than your overwhelming excitement that surf's up tomorrow. At my age, taking a dump is serious business."
"Can you meet Driscoll and me in the roll-call room?"
"In due time," the Oracle said. "There's a time for everything."
They chose the roll-call room for privacy. The Oracle examined the purse and contents, and as he looked at this angry suntanned surfer cop with his short hair gelled up like a bed of spikes, and at his older partner twitching his nose like a rabbit, he said to them, "You're right. This has to be a sting. This is unadulterated bullshit!"
Flotsam and Jetsam were lying in the sand next to their boards, by their towels and water, when Jetsam, reaching this part of the story, stopped to take a long pull from his water bottle.
Flotsam said, "Don't stop, dude. Get to the final reel. What the fuck happened?"
Jetsam said, "What happened was the Oracle came on like El Ni$?o, and everybody stayed outta his way. The Oracle was hacked off, bro. And I got to see what all those hash marks give you."
"What besides death before your time?"
"Humongous prunes and no fear, bro. The Oracle jumped their shit till the story came out. It was a sting, but as usual, Ethics Enforcement Section fucked up. It wasn't meant for B. M. Driscoll. He's so straight he won't even remove mattress tags, but they wouldn't say who it was meant for. Maybe somebody on Watch three. We think communications just gave the call to the wrong unit."
Flotsam said, "EES should stick to catching cops who work off-duty jobs when they're supposed to be home with bad backs. That's all they're good for."
"Being an LAPD cop today is like playing a game of dodgeball, but the balls are coming at us from every-fucking-where," Jetsam said.
Flotsam looked at his partner's thousand-yard stare, saying, "Your display is on screen saver, dude. Get the hard drive buzzing and stay real."
"Okay, but I don't like being treated like a thief," Jetsam said.
Flotsam said, "They gotta play their little games so they can say, `Look, Mr. Attorney General, we're enforcing the consent decree against the formerly cocky LAPD.' Just forget about it."
"But we got sideswiped, bro."
"Whaddaya mean?"
"They burned us."
"For what?"
"The undercover team saw B. M. Driscoll's uniforms hanging in the car. They had to nail us for something after we didn't fall for their stupid sting, so we're getting an official reprimand for doing personal business on duty."
"Stopping at the cleaners?"
"You got it, bro."
"What'd the Oracle say about that?"
"He wasn't there at the time. He'd already headed out for Alfonso's Tex Mex when a rat from PSB showed up. One of those that can't stop scratching all the insect bites on his candy ass. And the watch commander informed us we were getting burned."
"That is way fucked, dude. You know how many man hours were wasted on that chickenshit sting? And here we are, with half the bodies we need to patrol the streets."
"That is life in today's LAPD, bro."
"How's your morale?"
"It sucks."
"How would it be if I got you laid Thursday night?"
"Improved."
"There's this badge bunny I heard about at the Director's Chair. Likes midnight swims at the beach, I hear."
"I thought you said you'd fallen in love with Mag Takara?"
"I am in love, but it ain't working too good."
"You said it was hopeful."
"Let's hit it, dude," Flotsam said to change the subject, grabbing his board and sprinting for the surf. He plunged into a cold morning breaker and came up grinning in the boiling ocean foam.
After Jetsam paddled out to his partner, he looked at Flotsam and said, "So what happened between you and Mag? Too painful to talk about?"
"She's got it all, dude. The most perfect chick I ever met," Flotsam said. "Do you know what the Oracle told me? When he walked a beat in Little Tokyo a hundred years ago, he
got to know the Takara family. They own a couple of small hotels, three restaurants, and I don't know how much rental property. That little honey might have some serious assets of her own someday."
"No wonder you're in love."
"And she is such a robo-babe. You ever see more beautiful lips? And the way she walks like a little panther? And her skin like ivory and the way her silky hair falls against her gracefully curving neck?"
Sitting astride his surfboard, Jetsam said, "`Gracefully curving' . . . bro, you are way goony! Stay real! This could just be false enchantment because she grabbed that dummy hand grenade and tossed it that time."
Flotsam said, "Then I got way pumped the last night we worked together. I knew after my days off, you and me would be teamed for the rest of the deployment period, so I took the bit in my teeth and I went for it. I said something like, `Mag, I hope I can persuade you to grab a bikini and surf with me on the twilight ocean with the molten sun setting into the darkling sea.'"
"No, bro!" Jetsam said. "No darkling sea! That is sooo nonbitchin'!" He paused. "What'd she say to that?"
"Nothing at first. She's a very reserved girl, you know. Finally, she said, `I think I would rather stuff pork chops in my bikini and swim in a tank full of piranhas than go surfing with you at sunset, sunrise, or anytime in between.'"
"That is like, way discouraging, bro," Jetsam said somberly. "Can't you see that?"
Flotsam and Jetsam weren't the only ones complaining about the LAPD watchers that day. One of the watchers, D2 Brant Hinkle, had been biding his time at Internal Affairs Group. He was on the lieutenant's list but was afraid that the list was going to run out of time before an opening came for him. He was optimistic now that all of the black males and females of any race who'd finished lower on the written and oral exam than he had but got preference had already been selected. Even though he wasn't a D3 supervisor, he'd had enough prior supervisory experience in his package to qualify for the lieutenant's exam, and he'd done pretty well on it. He didn't think anyone else could leapfrog over him before the list expired.
It had been an interesting two-year assignment at IAG, good for his personnel package but not so good for the stomach. He was experiencing acid reflux lately and was staring down the barrel at his fifty-third birthday. With twenty-nine years on the Job this was his last realistic chance to make lieutenant before pulling the pin and retiring to . . . well, he wasn't sure where. Somewhere out of L. A. before the city imploded.
Brantley Hinkle was long divorced, with two married daughters but no grandchildren yet, and he tried for a date maybe twice a month after he heard a colleague his age say, "Shit, Charles Manson gets a dozen marriage proposals a year, and I can't get a date."
It made him realize how seldom he had a real date, let alone a sleepover, so he'd been making more of an effort lately. There was a forty-year-old divorced PSR whose honeyed tones over the police radio could trigger an incipient erection. There was an assistant district attorney he'd met at a retirement party for one of the detectives at Robbery-Homicide Division. There was even a court reporter, a Pilates instructor in her spare time, who was forty-six years old but looked ten years younger and had never been married. She'd whipped him into better shape with a diet and as much Pilates as he could stand. His waistband got so loose he couldn't feel his cell phone vibrating.
So he was in decent condition and still had most of his hair, though it was as gray as pewter now, and he didn't need glasses, except for reading. He could usually connect with one of the three women when he was lonely and the need arose, but he hadn't been trying lately. He was more focused on leaving Professional Standards Bureau and getting back to a detective job somewhere to await the promotion to lieutenant. If it came.
At IAG Brant Hinkle had seen complaints obsessively investigated for allegations that would have been subjects of fun and needling at retirement parties back in the days before the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal. Back before the federal consent decree.
And they weren't just coming from citizens; they were coming from other cops. He'd had to oversee one where a patrol sergeant his age looked at a woman officer in a halter bra and low-ride shorts who had just come from working out. Staring at her sweaty belly, the sergeant had sighed. That was it, he'd sighed. The woman officer beefed the sergeant, and that very expensive sigh got him a five-day suspension for workplace harassment.
Then there was the wrestling match at arrest-and-control school, where a male officer was assigned to wrestle with a woman officer in order to learn certain holds. The male cop said aloud to his classmates, "I can't believe I get paid for this."
She'd beefed him, and he'd gotten five days also.
Yet another involved a brand-new sergeant who, on his way to his first duty assignment as a sergeant, happened to spot one of the patrol units blow a stop sign on their way to a hot call that the unit had not been assigned. The sergeant arrived at his new post, and immediately he wrote a 1.28 personnel complaint.
Within his first month, that sergeant, a man who wore his new stripes with gusto, called one of the officers on his watch a "dumbbell." The officer made an official complaint against him. The sergeant got a five-day suspension. The troops cheered.
Under the federal consent decree with the legions of LAPD overseers, the cops were turning on each other and eating their own. It was a different life from the one he'd lived when he'd joined the world-famous LAPD, uncontested leader in big-city law enforcement. In Brant Hinkle's present world, even IAG investigators were subjected to random urine tests conducted by Scientific Investigation Division.
The IAG investigators who had preceded him said that during Lord Voldemort's Reign of Terror, they sometimes had six Boards of Rights-the LAPD equivalent of a military court martial-going on at one time, even though there were only five boardrooms. People had to wait in the corridors for a room to clear. It was an assembly line of fear, and it brought about the phenomenon of cops lawyering up with attorneys hired for them by their union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
The more senior investigators told him that at that time, everyone had joked grimly that they expected a cop to walk out of his Board of Rights after losing his career and pension and leap over the wrought-iron railing of the Bradbury Building into the courtyard five stories down.
The Bradbury Building, at 304 South Broadway, was an incongruous place in which to house the dreaded Professional Standards Bureau, with its three hundred sergeants and detectives, including the Internal Affairs Group, all of whom had to handle seven thousand complaints a year, both internally and externally generated against a police force of nine thousand officers. The restored 1893 masterpiece, with its open-cage elevators, marble staircases, and five-story glass roof, was probably the most photographed interior in all of Los Angeles.
Many a film noir classic had been shot inside that Mexican-tile courtyard flooded with natural light. He could easily imagine the ghosts of Robert Mitchum and Bogart exiting any one of the balcony offices in trench coats and fedoras as ferns in planter pots cast ominous shadows across their faces when they lit their inevitable smokes. Brant knew that nobody dared light a cigarette in the Bradbury Building today, this being twenty-first-century Los Angeles, where smoking cigarettes is a PC misdemeanor, if not an actual one.
Brant Hinkle was currently investigating a complaint against a female training officer in a patrol division whose job it had been to bring a checklist every day for a sergeant to sign off. After a year of this bureaucratic widget counting, where half the time she couldn't find a sergeant, she'd just decided to create one with a fictitious name and fictitious serial number.
But then the "fraud" was discovered, and no check forger had ever been so actively pursued. IAG sent handwriting exemplars downtown to cement the case against the hapless woman whom the brass was determined to fire. But as it turned out, there was a one-year statute on such offenses, and they couldn't fire her. In fact, they couldn't do anything except transfer her to
a division that might cause her a long drive and make her miserable, this veteran cop who had had an unblemished record but had finally succumbed to the deluge of audits and paperwork.
Brant Hinkle and his team were secretly happy that she'd kept her job. Like Brant, just about all of them were using IA experience as a stepping-stone to promotion and weren't the rats that street cops imagined them to be.
As Brant Hinkle put it, "We're just scared little mice stuck in a glue trap."
Once when they were all bemoaning the avalanche of worthless and demoralizing complaints that the oppressive oversight armies had invited, Brant said to his colleagues, "When I was a kid and Dragnet was one of the biggest hits on TV, Jack Webb's opening voice-over used to say, `This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. . . . I'm a cop.' Today all we can say is, `This is the city. Los Angeles, California. I work here. . . . I'm an auditor.'"
Probably the most talked-about investigation handled by Brant Hinkle during these we-investigate-every-complaint years was the one involving a woman who had become obsessed with a certain cop and made an official complaint against him, signed and dated, maintaining, "He stole my ovaries."
It had to be investigated in full, including with lengthy interviews. There had to be an on-the-record denial by the police officer in question, who said to Brant, "Well, I'm glad IA is taking her complaint seriously. There could be something to this ovary theft. After all, you guys are trying real hard to steal my balls, and you've just about done it."
It was probably at that moment that Brant Hinkle spoke to his boss about a transfer back to a divisional detective squad.
Chapter NINE
WATCH 5, THE ten-hour midwatch, from 5:15 P. M. to 4:00 A. M. with an unpaid lunch break (code 7), had about fifty officers assigned to it. Five of them were women, but three of those women were on light duty for various reasons, and there were only two in the field, Budgie and Mag. And what with days off, sick days, and light duty, on a typical weekend night it was difficult for the Oracle to find enough bodies to field more than six or eight cars. So when one of the vice unit's sergeants asked to borrow both of the midwatch women for a Saturday-night mini-version of the Trick Task Force, he got an argument.
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